This month is probably full of uninteresting things, unsatisfactory progress, me being burned out, going on game development tangents and giving up more projects. Let’s do it boyz!

On the more upbeat side of things, the first game I worked on my capstone, Bopping Blobs, is finally out on the Google Play Store! It was a quick six-week project to get people all warmed up on game development, the game is all about giving you a short and easy entertainment for no more than 2 minutes!

Go grab it on Google Play Store! (Link Here)

So, now for the actual update of the month.

I was feeling burned out in general with Capstone (around 8hrs/day) and classes and all the things I still would have to do, so I didn’t really feel like being strict on myself to work on side projects. I know that I need to be working on more projects in order to achieve my goal of working in AAA, but being honest, the game I’m doing in capstone and performing well in school is a bigger priority. And knowledge and released games on Unity is not really what AAA cares about the most.

So this brings us to the freshly made decision of: I will not work on Aglarond anymore. I’ve been studying roguelikes a lot recently, because I wanted to do my own, and I got a few conclusions:

• A roguelike is all about experimentation and exploration;
• The fun in a roguelike emerges from all the interactions of all systems and from the feeling of mastering each one of them;
• Ultimately, a roguelike is a game about telling stories, it is all about what the player will tell their friends, they will talk about that time where they pressed a switch and set the entire room on fire, they will talk about that time where they went 20 floors deep and were killed by poisonous gas because they accidentally used the poison potion on the previous floor.

Doing a “roguelike” is easy, making a very good roguelike is hard, and way out of scope for the time frame I want and the resources I have.

Also, I wrote some devlog posts: Turn-Based System for Aglarond and A Postmortem for all the Roguelikes I ever tried to make!

But will I be working on them?

That’s so… Unreal

I’ve been messing with Unreal Engine 4 recently, following tutorials, reading about things and seeing how to do things, I have a very simple moving character and some collectible items, I’ve been enjoying using Unreal and I might keep working on this prototype. The goal for it is to be a simple Action RPG (i.e. Dark Souls) style gameplay demo.

But I cannot make an entire game in Unreal! I simply don’t have the time and resources for that either, that’s why I will be working on gameplay demos, which is what will help towards my goal of being a Gameplay Programmer in the game industry.

I want to be working on entire games as side projects, but I’ve managed to fail 3 or 4 projects this year already, and I have to improve and be good at two things: 1) programming gameplay and 2) C++ – And Unity does not help with the C++ side of the equation.

Maybe I can try to come up with things with even smaller scope (like 1-month games) and see how that goes. If I do that, I want to work on experimental or interesting game ideas, not on established formulas that everyone already knows.

But for now, I will just enjoy not having to force myself to work on a side project that I’m unsure if I can finish and release it.

Thanks for reading my update!